Anatoly Onoprienko - The Beast of Ukraine

 

In 1995 Anatoly Onoprienko told police officers he heard a voice telling him to kill people, but experts later went on to testify that this was not true, similarly to David Berkowitz who it was discovered after his trial that he was either lying about a dead dog talking to him or fantasizing about the voice, wanting it to be real. In the end, it was established there was nothing clinically wrong with Anatoly he was just a cold-blooded killer.

Anatoly grew up with a drunken abusive father and ended up being placed in an orphanage. He was initially shy but did make several friends. After a promising start, his education began to slip when he started to divulge in destructive behaviours such as under-age smoking, drinking, drugs and stealing. Not knowing what else to do with his life he decided to join the army and exposed himself to fire-arms learning all about them. His destructive behaviours caused him to be dishonourably discharged.

After the army, he got a job on a cruise ship and carried on his life of crime, stealing from the wealthy guests. He found himself a girlfriend, got her pregnant and despite aspiring to change his ways and honestly provide for his family he abandoned them both to return to crime.     

He managed to elude police well during 1989, but his crimes escalated when his landlady caught him stealing and he murdered her. He then began a wave of robbing houses. He used his rifle to shoot the owners of a campervan he had broken into and went on to kill two more. Then his urge to kill suddenly stopped dead. He later confessed that after this murder spree he contemplated suicide. 

In 1995 he fled to Ukraine. The Soviet Union had collapsed and police and law enforcement was in disarray. This atmosphere of lawlessness awakened something in Anatoly and pushed him to return to his previous life. He went to a relatives house and stole a shotgun, he cut off the barrel. In Odessa, he robbed the house of a seventy-year-old woman before shooting her and burning her house down. When travelling past a man and a woman having sex in their car, he shot the man point-blank, he let the woman go giving her a sense of false hope before shooting her as well. He torched the car after robbing it of any valuables.

After a month he had become confident in his style, and a pattern emerged where he would wait outside a house until after dark, lure out the man by throwing stones or gravel at the windows, when he came outside he would shoot him He would then spend some time hunting the women and children in the house before killing them too.

During this time he lived with his cousins and kept a rifle under his bed, it was later revealed that the cousin wanted to kick him out so badly that he set him up with a woman he knew. Anatoly and this new girlfriend seemed to hit it off very well. He even used a ring he had acquired by cutting off a finger of a dead woman to propose to her.

That winter he attacked remote villages and during Christmas 1995 a killing spree ensued in the guise of a robbery, but by this point, the police in Kiev had garnered the pattern in the murders and spread information to the public about the unusual gun that was used in these crimes.

Details got linked to the press and he got the nickname of "The Terminator." Eventually, the police were tipped off by Antaloy's neighbour reporting him holding the strange sawn-off shotgun. 

Twelve officers surrounded his house where a brief altercation ensued before he finally gave himself up.  They found him clinically fit for trial. He confessed to thirty-eight murders even co-operating with police as far as taking a dummy with them to the crime scenes to re-enact deaths for them. 

His demeanour then changed in court where he acted overly Satanic, an act which many jurors thought was for attention so he could plea insanity. He seemed to enjoy himself whilst testifying saying that Satan himself wanted him to kill three hundred and sixty people. 

He was found guilty of fifty-two murders in the end and was sentenced to death, he was never executed however due to a legal issue. People were in an uproar and began to protest this, but the outcome was not changed. 

He is jailed for life and had eligibility for parole in 2019 which was denied. The judge was adamant that if ever released he will carry on murdering and stealing.